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The last 3 years...

Submitted by snovak on Sat, 06/13/2015 - 12:47

For the last three years I've worked with Office Depot Global headquarters, in Boca Raton as a B2B contractor. My development team worked on Office Depot's European presence, Viking Direct. Viking represnts many countries, in many language combinations, a total of over 40 website permutations, supporting over $2 Billion in online commerce. In those 3 years, my team changed DRASTICALLY! When I started as a Sr UI (User Interface) Developer, in October 2011, I was 1 of 2 UI Developers, and 1 of 6 total developers on the team.

The Viking team grew to 25 developers. Along the way, in addition to continued development and bug fixes, I interviewed, hired and trained UI developers. I played many roles in my time at Office Depot. I advanced to Lead UI Developer, then UI Architect for a time. I helped refactor the UI codebase (CSS and JavaScript) into a far more modular structure, optimizing maintainability and end user performance. I assessed integration of frameworks like Foundation (SASS) and Bootstrap (LESS). I built a UI testing framework using Node.js and a Selenium package called Webdriver.IO, which automated testing and performing screen captures of each test at key assessment points along the way, the tool built HTML test reports for easy functionality assessments.

In the end, I became Lead Developer. A UI Developer, leading both UI and Functional (JAVA) development teams. At that time, the Viking team reduced from 25 to 8 developers. My team, in addition, took on responsibility for all other European websites, including iBSD (International Business Services Division), which more than doubled our work load. During this time, my roll largely moved from development to management. I helped facilitate communication; business to technical to end-user translation between European business teams and our US development team. I helped set priorities, put out fires in production (so to speak), and guide the development forward.

My story at Office Depot ends with the announcement that Staples will be acquiring Office Depot. I saw the announcement as a chance for me to follow a long awaited dream of building a second income stream, which is what I am doing today.

I'm currently in development of my first app! Feel free to check my progress on my Development Blog.